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One of them whispered into his wristpad. In a suspiciously short time Sam Houston appeared down the hallway, and as he hurried up glowering John laughed. “What were you doing, hiding around the corner?”
Houston walked right up to him, stuck his face forward and said in a low voice, “Look, Mr Boone, we’re in the midst of a very important investigation here, and you are obstructing it. Despite what you seem to believe you are not above the law—”
Boone jerked forward so that Houston had to flinch to avoid their bumping noses. “You aren’t the law,” he said. He unfolded his arms and poked Houston in the chest, driving him back further down the hall. Now Houston was losing his temper and Boone laughed at him. “What are you going to do to me, officer? Arrest me? Threaten me? Give me something good to include in my next report on Eurovid? Would you like that? Would you like me to show the world how John Boone was harassed by some tin-god tin-badge functionary, who came to Mars thinking he was a sheriff in the wild west?” He remembered his opinion that anyone who spoke of themselves in the third person was a self-declared idiot, and laughed and said, “John Boone doesn’t like that kind of thing! No he doesn’t!”
The other two had taken the opportunity to slip out of his room, and were now watching closely. Houston’s face was the color of Ascraeus Mons, and his teeth were revealed. “No one’s above the law,” he grated. “There are criminal acts occurring here, very dangerous ones, and quite a few of them happen when you’re around.”
“Like breaking and entering.”
“If we determine that we need to check your quarters, or your records, to pursue our investigation, then we’re going to do that. We have that authority.”
“I say you don’t,” John said arrogantly, and snapped his fingers in the man’s face.
“We are going to search your rooms,” Houston said, articulating each word very carefully.
“Get away,” Boone said, contemptuously jerking at the other two and waving them back. He laughed, lip curled with scorn: “That’s right, go! Get out of here, you incompetents – go back and read the regs on search and seizure!”
He went in his room and closed the door behind him.
He paused. It sounded like they were leaving, but either way he had to act like he didn’t care. He laughed, went to the bathroom and took some more painkillers.
They hadn’t yet gotten to the closet, which was lucky; it would have been hard to explain the torn walker without telling the truth, and that would have been messy. Curious how tangled things got when you concealed the fact that someone had tried to kill you. That made him pause. The attempt had been pretty clumsy, after all. There must have been a hundred more effective ways to kill someone out in a walker on Mars. So if they were just trying to scare him, or were perhaps hoping that he would try to conceal the attack, so that they could find him lying, and then have something on him …
He shook his head, confused. Occam’s razor, Occam’s razor. The detective’s primary tool. If someone attacks you they mean you harm, that was the basic, the fundamental fact. It was important to find out who the attackers were. And so on. The painkillers were strong, and the omegendorph was wearing off. It was getting hard to think. It was going to be a problem disposing of the walker; the helmet in particular was a big bulky thing. But now he was into it, and there was no graceful way out. He laughed; he knew he would think of something eventually.
He wanted to talk to Arkady. A call determined that Arkady had finished the gerontological treatment in Acheron with Nadia however, and had gone up to Phobos. John had still never visited the fast little moon. “Why don’t you come on up and see it?” Arkady said over the phone. “Better to talk in person, yes?”
“Okay.”
He hadn’t been in space since the landing from the Ares twenty-three years before and the familiar sensations of acceleration and weightlessness brought on an unexpected bout of nausea. He told Arkady about it as they docked with Phobos, and Arkady said, “It always used to happen to me, until I started drinking vodka right before takeoff.” He had a long physiological explanation for this, but the details began to pull John back over the edge and he cut him off. Arkady laughed; the gerontological treatment had given him its usual post-operative lift, and he had been a happy man to begin with: he didn’t look like he would be sick again for a thousand years.
Stickney turned out to be a bustling little town, the crater’s concrete dome lined with the latest heavy-duty radiation proofing, and the floor of the crater terraced in concentric rings down to a bottom plaza. The rings alternated between parks and two-storied buildings with gardens on their roofs. There were nets in the air for people who lost control of their leaps across the city, or took off by accident: escape velocity was only fifty kilometers per hour, so it was almost possible to run right off the moon. Just under the dome foundation John spotted a small version of the exterior circumnavigating train, running horizontally compared to the buildings of the town, and moving at a speed that returned its passengers to a sensation of Martian gravity. It stopped four times a day to take people on, but if John took refuge in it that would only delay his acclimatization, so he went to the guest room assigned to him, and miserably waited out the nausea. It seemed he was a planet dweller now, a Martian for good, so that leaving it was pain. Ridiculous but true.
The next day he felt better, and Arkady took him on a tour of Phobos. The interior was honeycombed with tunnels, galleries, drifts, and several enormous open chambers, many of them still being enlarged, mined for water and fuel. Most of the interior tunnels inside the moon were smooth functional tubes, but the interior rooms and some of the big galleries had been built according to Arkady’s socio-architectural theories, and he showed John around some of these: circular hallways, mixed work and recreation areas, terracing, etched metallic walls, all features that had become standard during Mars’s crater-oriented phase of construction, but of which Arkady was still proud.
Three of the little surface craters on the side opposite to Stickney had been domed with glass and filled with villages which had a view of the planet rushing beneath them – views never available from Stickney, as Phobos’s long axis was permanently aligned toward Mars, with the big crater always pointed away. Arkady and John stood in Semenov, looking up through the dome at Mars, which filled half the sky and was shrouded by its dust clouds, all its features obscured. “The Great Storm,” Arkady said. “Sax must be going mad.”
“No,” John said. “A thing of the moment, he says. A glitch.”
Arkady hooted. Already the two of them had fallen back into their old easy camaraderie, the feeling that they were equals, brothers from way back. Arkady was the same as ever, laughing, joking, a great kidder, ideas and opinions flooding out of him, confident in a way that John enjoyed immensely, even now, when he was sure many of Arkady’s ideas were wrong, and even dangerous.
“Sax is probably right, in fact,” Arkady said. “If those ageing treatments work, and we are living decades longer than previously, it will certainly cause a social revolution. Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work – no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again. But look, if you learn it, and then stare at it for fifty more years, you will eventually be saying, Why not make this more rational? Why not make it closer to our heart’s desire? What’s stopping us?”
“Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange down there,” John said. “But somehow I don’t think these people are taking the long view.” He gave Arkady a quick account of the sabotage situation, and ending it by saying boldly: “Do you know who’s doing it, Arkady? Are you involved?”
“What, me? No, John, you know me better than that. These destructions are stupid. The work of reds, from the look of it, and I am no red. I don’t know exactly who is doing it. Probably Ann does, have you asked her?”
“She says she doesn’t know.”
Arkady cackled. “Still my same John Boone! I love it. Look here, my friend, I will tell you why these things are happening, and then you can work at it systematically, and perhaps see more. Ah, here’s the subway to Stickney – come on, I want to show you the infinity vault, it’s really a nice piece of work.” He led John to the little subway car, and they floated down a tunnel to near the center of Phobos, where the car stopped and they got out. They pushed across the narrow room, and pulled themselves down a hall; John noted that his body had adjusted to the weightlessness, that he could float and keep his trim again. Arkady led him into an expansive open gallery, which on first glance appeared to be too large to be contained inside of Phobos: floor, wall and ceiling were paneled in faceted mirrors, and each round slab of polished magnesium had been angled so that anyone in its microgravity space was reflected in thousands of infinite regresses.
They touched down on the floor and hooked their toes through rings, floating like sea bottom plants in a shifting crowd of Arkadys and Johns. “You see, John, the economic basis of life on Mars is now changing,” Arkady said. “No, don’t you dare scoff! So far we have not been living in a money economy, that’s the way scientific stations are. It’s like winning a prize that frees you from the economic wheel. We won that prize, and so did a lot of others, and we’ve all been here for years now, living that way. But now more people are flooding onto Mars, thousands of them! And many of them plan to work here, make some money, and return to Earth. They work for the transnationals that have gotten UNOMA concessions. The letter of the Mars treaty is being kept because supposedly UNOMA is in charge of it all, but the spirit of the treaty is being broken left and right, by the UN itself.”
John was nodding. “Yes, I’ve seen that. Helmut told me about it right to my face.”
“Helmut is a snail. But listen, when the treaty renewal comes up, they will change the letter of the law to match the new spirit. Or even give themselves licence to do more. It’s the discovery of strategic metals, and all the open space. These represent salvation to a lot of countries down there, and new territory for the transnationals.”
“And you think they’ll have enough support to change the treaty?”
Millions of Arkadys stared bug-eyed at millions of Johns. “Don’t be so naive! Of course they have enough support! Look, the Mars treaty is based on the old Outer Space treaty. That was the first mistake, because the Outer Space treaty was in fact a very fragile arrangement, and so the Mars treaty is too. According to the treaty’s own provisions, countries can become voting members of the treaty council by establishing an interest here, which is why we’re seeing all the new national scientific stations, the Arab League, Nigeria, Indonesia, Azania, Brazil, India and China and all the rest. And quite a few of these new countries are becoming treaty members specifically with the intent to break the treaty at renewal time. They want to open up Mars to individual governments, outside UN control. And the transnationals are using flag of convenience countries like Singapore and the Seychelles and Moldavia to try to open Mars to private settlement, ruled by corporations.”
“The renewal is still a few years off,” John said.
A million Arkadys rolled their eyes. “It’s happening now. Not just in talk, but in what’s happening day-to-day down there. When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world, we didn’t even own things – some clothes, a lectern, and that was it! Now you know what I think, John. This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from three millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is Utopia, John, especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric Utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.”
“You’d think everyone would join,” John said.
“Yes, and they might, but it isn’t being offered to them. And that means it wasn’t a true Utopia. We clever primate scientists were willing to carve out islands for ourselves, rather than work to create such conditions for everyone. And so in reality, the islands are part of the transnational order. They are paid for, they are never truly free, there is never a case of truly pure research. Because the people who pay for the scientist islands will eventually want a return on their investment. And now we are entering that time. A return is being demanded for our island. We were not doing pure research, you see, but applied research. And with the discovery of strategic metals the application has become clear. And so it all comes back, and we have a return of ownership, and prices, and wages. The whole profit system. The little scientific station is being turned into a mine, with the usual mining attitude toward the land over the treasure. And the scientists are being asked, what you do, how much is it worth? They are being asked to do their work for pay, and the profit of their work is to be given over to the owners of the businesses they are suddenly working for.”
“I don’t work for anyone,” John said.
“Well, but you work on the terraforming project, and who pays for that?”
John tried out Sax’s answer: “The sun.”
Arkady hooted. “Wrong! It’s not just the sun and some robots, it’s human time, a lot of it. And those humans have to eat and so on. And so someone is providing for them, for us, because we have not bothered to set up a life where we provide for ourselves.”
John frowned. “Well, in the beginning we had to have the help. That was billions of dollars of equipment flown up here. Lots of work time, like you say.”
“Yes, it’s true. But once we arrived we could have focused all our efforts on making ourselves self-sufficient and independent, and then paid them back and been done with them. But we didn’t, and now the loan sharks are here. Look, back in the beginning, if someone were to ask us who made more money, you or me, it would have been impossible to say, right?”
“Right.”
“A meaningless question. But now you ask, and we have to confer. Do you consult for anybody?”
“Nobody.”
“Me neither. But Phyllis consults for Amex, and Subarashii, and Armscor. And Frank consults for Honeywell-Messerschmidt, and GE, and Boeing, and Subarashii. And so on. They are richer than us. And in this system, richer is more powerful.”
We’ll just see about that, John thought. But he didn’t want to make Arkady laugh again, so he didn’t say it.
“And it is happening everywhere on Mars,” Arkady said. Around them clouds of Arkadys waved their arms, looking like a Tibetan mandala of red-haired demons. “And naturally there are people who notice what’s going on. Or I tell them. And this is what you must understand, John; there are people who will fight to keep things the way they were. There are people who loved the feel of life as a scientist primitive, so much that they will refuse to give it up without a fight.”
“So the sabotages…”
“Yes! Perhaps some of them are done by these people. It is counterproductive, I think, but they don’t agree. Mostly the sabotage is done by people who want to keep Mars the way it was before we arrived. I am not one of those. But I am one of those who will fight to keep Mars from becoming a free zone for transnational mining. To keep us all from becoming happy slaves for some executive class, walled in its fortress mansion.” He faced John, and out of the corner of his eye John saw around them an infinity of confrontations. “Don’t you feel the same?”
“I do, actually.” He grinned. “I do! I think if we disagree, it’s mostly on the matter of methods.”
“What methods do you propose to use?”
“Well – basically, I want to get the treaty renewed as it stands, and then adhered to. If that happens then we’ll have what we want, or we’ll have the basis for getting to full independence, at least.”
“The treaty will not be renewed,” Arkady said flatly. “It will take something much more radical to stop these people, John. Direct action – yes, don’t you look so unbelieving! Seizure of some property, or of the communication system – the institution of our own set of laws, backed by everyone here, out in the streets – yes, John, yes! It will come to that, because there are guns under the table. Mass demonstration and insurrection is the only thing that will beat them, history shows this.”
A million Arkadys clustered around John, looking graver than any Arkady he could ever remember seeing – so grave that the blossoming rows of John’s own face exhibited a regressive expression of slack-jawed concern. He pulled his mouth shut. “I’d like to try my way first,” he said.
Which made all the Arkadys laugh. John gave him a playful shove on the arm and Arkady went to the floor, then pushed off and tackled him. They wrestled while they could keep contact and then flew away to opposite sides of the chamber; in the mirrors, millions of them flew away into infinity.
After that they went back to the subway, and to dinner in Semenov. As they ate they looked up at the surface of Mars, swirled like a gas giant. Suddenly it looked to John like a great orange cell, or embryo, or egg. Chromosomes whipping about under a mottled orange shell. A new creature waiting to be born, genetically engineered for sure; and they were the engineers, still working on what kind of creature it would be. They were all trying to clip the genes they wanted (their own) onto plasmids and insert them into the planet’s DNA spirals, to get the expressions they wanted from the new chimerical beast. Yes. And John liked much of what Arkady wanted to put into it. But he had his own ideas as well. They would see who managed to create more of the genome in the end.
He glanced at Arkady, who was also looking up at the sky-filling planet, with the same grave expression that had been on his face in the hall of mirrors. It was a look that had been impressed on John very accurately and powerfully, he found, but in a weird multiple fly’s-vision format.
John descended back into the murk of the Great Storm, and down in the dim blustery sandswept days he saw things he hadn’t seen before. That was the value of talking with Arkady. He paid attention to things in a new way; he travelled south from Burroughs, for instance, to Sabishii (“Lonely”) Mohole, and visited the Japanese who lived there. They were old-timers, the Japanese equivalent of the first hundred, on Mars only seven years after the first hundred had arrived; and unlike the first hundred they had become a very tight unit, and had “gone native” in a big way. Sabishii had remained small, even after the mohole was dug there. It was out in a region of rough boulders near Jarry-Desloges Crater, and as he drove down the last part of the transponder trail to the settlement, John caught brief glimpses of boulders carved into oversized faces or figures, or covered with elaborate pictographs, or hollowed out into little Shinto or Zen shrines. He stared in the dustclouds after these visions, but they were always gone like hallucinations, half-seen and then disappeared. As he passed into the tattered zone of clear air directly downwind from the mohole, he noticed that the Sabishiians were taking the rock hauled out of the great shaft to this area and arranging it into curving mounds – a pattern – from space it would look like, what, a dragon? And then he arrived at the garage and was greeted by a group of them, barefoot and long-haired, in frayed tan jumpers or sumo-wrestler jock straps: wizened old Japanese Martian sages, who talked about the kami centers in the region, and how their deepest sense of on had long ago shifted from the emperor to the planet. They showed him their labs, where they were working on areo-botany and radiation-proofed clothing materials. They had also done extensive work on aquifer location, and climatology in the equatorial belt. Listening to them it seemed to John that they just had to be in touch with Hiroko, it didn’t make sense that they weren’t. But they shrugged when he asked about her. John went to work drawing them out, establishing the atmosphere of trust that he was so often able to generate in old-timers, the sense that they went back a long way together, into their own Noachian. A couple of days of asking questions, of learning the town, of showing that he was “a man who knew giri”, and slowly they began to open up, telling him in a quiet but blunt way that they did not like the sudden growth of Burroughs, nor the mohole next to them, nor the population increase in general, nor the new pressures put on them by the Japanese government to survey the Great Escarpment and “find gold”. “We refuse,” said Nanao Nakayama, a wrinkled old man with scraggly white whiskers and turquoise earrings, and long white hair in a pony tail. “They cannot make us.”
“And if they try?” John asked.
“They will fail.” And his easy assurance caught John’s attention; and he remembered the conversation with Arkady among the mirrors.
So some of the things he now saw were the result of paying attention in a new way, of asking new questions. But others were the result of Arkady sending word down through his network of friends and acquaintances, to identify themselves to John and show him around. Thus when John stopped in settlements on the way from Sabishii to Senzeni Na, he was often approached by small groups of two, or three, or five, who introduced themselves and said, Arkady thought you might be interested to see this… And they would lead him to see an underground farm with an independent power plant, or a cache of tools and equipment, or a hidden garage full of rovers, or complete little mesa habitats, empty but ready for occupation. John would follow them bug-eyed and slack-jawed, asking questions and shaking his head in amazement. Yes, Arkady was showing him things; there was a whole movement down here, a little group in every town!
Eventually he came to Senzeni Na. He was returning because Pauline had identified two workers there as absent without explanation from their jobs, on the day the truck had fallen on him. The day after he arrived he interviewed them, but they proved to have plausible explanations for their absence from the net; they had been out climbing. But after he had apologized for taking their time, and started back to his room, three other mohole technicians introduced themselves as friends of Arkady’s. John greeted them enthusiastically, glad that something would come of the trip; and in the end a group of eight took him in a rover to a canyon paralleling the mohole’s canyon. They drove down through the obscuring dust to a habitat dug into an overhanging canyon wall: it was invisible to satellites, its heat released from a number of dispersed small vents which from space would look like Sax’s old windmill heaters. “We figure that’s how Hiroko’s group has done it,” one of his guides told him. Her name was Marian, and she had a long beak of a nose and eyes that were set too close together, so that her gaze was very intent.
“Do you know where Hiroko is?” John asked.
“No, but we think they’re in the chaos.”
The universal response. He asked them about the cliff dwelling. It had been built, Marian told him, with equipment from Senzeni Na. It was currently uninhabited, but ready if needed.
“Needed for what?” John said as he walked around the little dark rooms of the place.
Marian stared at him. “For the revolution, of course.”
“The revolution!”
John had very little to say on the drive back. Marian and her companions sensed his shock, and it made them uneasy too; perhaps they were concluding that Arkady had made a mistake in asking them to show John their habitat. “There are a lot of these being prepared,” Marian said defensively. Hiroko had given them the idea, and Arkady thought they might come in handy. She and her companions began ticking them off on their fingers: a whole stockpile of air and ice mining equipment, buried in a dry ice tunnel at one of the south polar cap processing stations; a wellhole tapping the big aquifer under Kasei Vallis; scattered greenhouse labs around Acheron, growing pharmacologically useful plants; a communications center in the basement of Nadia’s concourse at Underhill. “And that’s just what we know about. There are one-read samizdat appearing in the net that we had nothing to do with, and Arkady’s certain that there are other groups out there, doing the same thing we are. Because when push comes to shove, we’re all going to need places to hide and fight from.”
“Oh come on,” John said. “You all have to get it through your heads that this whole revolution scenario is nothing but a fantasia on the American revolution, you know, the great frontier, the hardy pioneer colonists exploited by the imperial power, the revolt to go from colony to sovereign state – it’s all just a false analogy!”
“Why do you say that?” Marian demanded. “What’s different?”
“Well for one thing, we’re not living on land that can sustain us. And for another, we don’t have the means to revolt successfully!”
“I disagree with both those points. You should talk to Arkady more about that.”
“I’ll try. Anyway I think there’s a better way of doing it than all this sneaking around stealing equipment, something more direct. We simply tell UNOMA what the new Mars treaty is going to say.”
His companions shook their heads scornfully.
“We can talk all we want,” Marian said, “but that’s not going to change what they do.”
“Why not? Do you think they can just ignore the people who are living here? They may have continuous shuttles now, but we’re still eighty million kilometers away from them, and we’re here and they’re not. It may not be North America in the 1760s, but we do have some of the same advantages: we’re at a great distance, and we’re in possession. The important thing is not to fall into their way of thinking, into all the same old violent mistakes!”
And so he argued against revolution, nationalism, religion, economics – against every mode of Terran thought that he could think of, all mashed together in his usual style. “Revolution never even worked on Earth, not really. And here it’s all outmoded. We should be inventing a new program, just like Arkady says, including the ways to take control of our fate. With you all living a fantasy of the past you’re leading us right into the repression you’re complaining about! We need a new Martian way, a new Martian philosophy, economics, religion!”
They asked him just what these new Martian modes of thought might be, and he raised his hands. “How can I say? When they’ve never existed it’s hard to talk about them, hard to imagine them, because we don’t have the images. That’s always the problem when you try to make something new, and believe me I know, because I’ve been trying. But I think I can tell you what it will feel like; it will feel like the first years here, when we were a group and we all worked together. When there was no purpose in life except to settle and discover this place, and we all decided together what we should do. That’s how it should feel.”
“But those days are gone,” Marian said, and the others nodded. “That’s just your own fantasy of the past. Nothing but words. It’s like you’re holding a philosophy class in a giant gold mine, with armies bearing down on both sides.”
“No no,” John said. “I’m talking about methods for resistance, methods appropriate to our real situation, and not some revolutionary fantasy out of the history books!”
And around they went, again and again, until they were back at Senzeni Na, and had retired to the workers’ rooms on the lowest residential floor. There they argued passionately, through the time-slip and long into the night; and as they argued a certain elation filled John, because he could see them beginning to think about it – it was clear that they were listening to him, and that what he said, and what he thought of them, mattered to them. This was the best return yet on the old First Man fishbowl; combined with Arkady’s stamp of approval, it gave him an influence over them that was palpable, he could shake their confidence, he could make them think, he could force them to re-evaluate, he could change their minds!
And so in the murky purple Great Storm dawn they wandered down the halls to the kitchen and talked on, looking out the windows and bolting down coffee, glowing with a kind of inspiration, with the age-old excitement of honest debate. And when they finally quit to go catch a little sleep before the day got going, even Marian was clearly shaken, and all of them were deep in thought, half-convinced that John was right.
John walked back to his guest suite feeling tired but happy. Whether Arkady had intended to or not, he had made John one of the leaders of his movement. Perhaps he would come to regret it, but there was no going back now. And John was sure it was for the best. He could be a sort of bridge between this underground and the rest of the people on Mars – operating in both worlds, reconciling the two, forging them into a single force that would be more effective than either alone. A force with the mainstream’s resources and the underground’s enthusiasm, perhaps. Arkady considered that an impossible synthesis; but John had powers that Arkady didn’t. So that he could, well, not usurp Arkady’s leadership, but simply change them all.
The door to his room in the guest quarters was open. He rushed in, alarmed, and there in the room’s two chairs sat Sam Houston and Michael Chang. “So,” Houston said. “Where have you been?”
“Oh come on,” John said. His temper flared, his good mood burnt off in a flash. “Did I pick the wrong door by mistake?” He leaned back out to look. “No, I didn’t. These are my rooms.” He lifted his arms and clicked on his wristpad’s recorder. “What are you doing in here?”
“We want to know where you’ve been,” Houston said evenly. “We’ve got the authority to enter all the rooms here, and to get all our questions answered. So you might as well start.”
“Come on,” John scoffed. “Don’t you ever get tired of playing the bad cop? Don’t you guys ever trade off?”
“We just want answers to our questions,” Chang said gently.
“Oh please, mister good cop,” John said. “We all want answers to our questions, don’t we?”
Houston stood up; already he was on the edge of losing his temper, and John walked right over to him and stopped with their chests about ten centimeters apart. “Get out of my rooms,” he said. “Get out now, or I’ll throw you out, and then we’ll figure out who had the right to be in here.”
Houston merely stared at him, and without warning John shoved him hard in the chest; Houston ran into his chair and sat down involuntarily, bounced up going for John, but Chang jumped between them, saying, “Wait a second, Sam, wait a second,” while John shouted “Get out of my rooms!” over and over at the top of his lungs, bumping against Chang’s back and glaring over his shoulder into Houston’s red face. John nearly burst into laughter at the sight; his high spirits had returned with the success of the shove, and he stalked to the door bellowing “Get out! Get out! Get out!” so that Houston would not see the grin on his face. Chang pulled his angry colleague out into the hall and John followed. The three of them stood there, Chang carefully placing himself between his partner and John. He was bigger than either of them, and now he faced John with a worried, irritated look.
“Now what did you want?” John said innocently.
“We want to know where you’ve been,” Chang said doggedly. “We have reason to suspect that your so-called investigation of the sabotage incidents has been a very convenient cover for you.”
“I suspect the same of you,” John said.
Chang ignored him. “Things keep happening right after your visits, you see — ”
“They happen right during your visits.”
“—hoppers of dust were dropped in every mohole you visited during the Great Storm. Computer viruses attacked the software in Sax Russell’s office at Echus Overlook, right after your consultation with him in 2047. Biological viruses attacked the fast lichens at Acheron right after you left. And so on.”
John shrugged. “So? You’ve been here two months, and that’s the best you can do?”
“If we’re right, it’s good enough. Where were you last night?”
